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Payam Maleki , social bookmarking in education
Payam Maleki CallJdku912 ' ' What is Social Bookmarking? We all have our favourite websites that we return to frequently or may find a really useful site that you wish to save for future reference. We know we do not have to write down the sometimes lengthy and complicated URL (web address), but traditionally save it for future use to Favourites in our web browser. With traditional bookmarking within a web browser, one of the restrictions is you can only access your bookmarks on that computer. What happens if you want to share this resource with others? Well, in most cases, you would have to email the web link - not very efficient! This is where social bookmarking takes saving websites to the next level. Social bookmarking has developed as a social software tool that allows users to submit, classify, localise and share their bookmarked web pages to a central site where they can be located and ‘tagged’ by other users. It is a process that is used by people to organise, arrange, maintain and reserve links on website pages. Tags then provide the user the ability to insert keywords to distribute content to other sites on the internet. Bookmarking has become a series of shared spaces that, if used effectively by its users, have the potential to become a living resource. Users can share resources for a common purpose by simply accessing their bookmarking account to see what others have bookmarked. There are many social bookmarking sites and the list is growing, of which some of the more popular sites will be discussed in Session 2. Take a look at 'this clip', courtesy Common Craft. It explains in simple terms what social bookmarking is. In the following section you will learn in more detail, about the educational benefits of social bookmarking. The Educational Benefits of Social Bookmarking Recently, social bookmarking has become very popular in education. Many teachers complete and handout reading lists for students to use in assignments; this would be simplified and made more accessible by using a link to an online version of the teacher's preferred lists electronically through a social bookmarking site. Similarly, central to an institution, library or learning resource staff can create an electronic bank of researched and, more importantly, reviewed and verified web links for students to access from a VLE or the institution's website. So what’s so different about this type of bookmarking? What are the benefits and how can it help with teaching and learning? Think of your own experiences and reflect on how many times you have given a recommended reading list to your students only to find that the resources are no longer available. Recommended online resources in course booklets, by nature of the dynamics of the Internet, are often no longer available. This is both frustrating for you and your students. Bookmarking can solve this problem. Collaboration and Sharing Once you have bookmarked a site and organised it, you now may want to share it. Sharing is the most useful part of any social bookmarking tool. When users then rank the usefulness of a site, this rating also relates to the quality of the resource. What better for educational purposes! Both teachers and students can create a group account with a shared password. An advancement of this would be to create a unique tag for all group related links. Many social bookmarking sites also allow teachers to review and comment on links submitted by their students. Let us now look at some educational uses in more detail in the Case Study in the next section. Educational Case Study The case study below will give you further information and ideas for using social bookmarking in education. Exploring the Use of Social Bookmarking Technology in Education: An Analysis of Students’ Experiences using a Course-specific Delicious.com Account This study shows how social bookmarking, specifically Delicious.com, can be used in a course to provide an inexpensive answer to the question of rising course materials costs. Through a series of online focus groups, 53 students enrolled in a “Social Media and Public Relations” course revealed their apprehension toward using an unknown technology and discussed their positive and negative experiences with using the course-specific Delicious.com account. Implications for how social bookmarking can impact online and offline learning are discussed. This study sought to examine how students view social bookmarking in relation to the learning process through the following three research questions: • RQ1: How aware are students of social bookmarking? • RQ2: How do students describe their experiences with using a centralised social bookmarking account as a replacement for a course packet? • RQ3: What are the biggest advantages and disadvantages of social bookmarking in higher education from students’ perspectives? Methodology At a large Southeastern university, 59 students enrolled in a “Social Media and Public Relations” course to learn how different social media applications could be used in organisational communication and public relations campaigns. The instructor assigned readings from both a traditional textbook and a social bookmarking account that was made available to everyone in the course. Each week, the students were required to read one or two textbook chapters or research papers from academic journals as well as read between eight and 10 relevant bookmarked Web sites. Half-way through the semester, the instructor asked for the students to participate in one of six online focus groups to discuss their reactions to social bookmarking. Originally, the instructor had not planned on conducting online focus groups; however, students had expressed initial hesitation with social bookmarking, and input was sought before the midpoint of the semester to determine if the supplemental readings were found to be helpful. The Institutional Review Board at the instructor’s institution granted permission to collect the data through online focus groups since it was not a required portion of class and students had the option to withdraw from participation at any point. Students signed up to participate in the online focus groups that were moderated by the instructor. On average, the focus groups lasted slightly more than one hour (63 minutes) to answer four open-ended questions concerning the course’s social bookmark and the students’ learning experience. In addition to these questions, the focus group moderator allowed the students to detail their positive and negative experiences with using Delicious.com, which housed the course’s social bookmarking account. The focus groups were transcribed by the research team to ensure that the students’ exact language to describe their experiences. Results Though the participants in this study came from different academic backgrounds and had varying levels of experience with social bookmarking prior to the course, they shared many experiences. The participants in the focus group consisted of 14 graduate students (eight females, six males) and 45 undergraduates (32 females, 13 males). Roughly one-half of the students were studying public relations (27) while another quarter studied other communication-related topics. The remaining one-third of students came from education, business, and sports management departments on the University’s campus. The overall conclusion was that the use of social bookmarking significantly enhances the students' learning experience. 2.1 Social Bookmarking Examples As you can see from the image above, there are many social bookmarking tools out there with more joining weekly. With the variety that is available, as a teacher you have the option to use more than one in your teaching and learning according to its tools. Social Bookmarking within Social Sites Social bookmarking is now being seen as a popular tool within social sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This diagram shows the usage reports of different social sites (July 2009), in particular how users are sharing content. There is a trend for the more popular social networking sites like Facebook (24%) to include bookmarking as a function and to take over from the use of individual social bookmarking sites. They are seen as a 'one social tool does all' sites. However, there are bookmarking sites that offer an excellent service and you will now be introduced to some of the more popular ones.